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A Few Observations on Structure in Testing

On Twitter, Johan Jonasson reported today that he was about to attend a presentation called “Structured Testing vs Exploratory Testing”. This led to a few observations and comments that I’d like to collect here. Over the years, it’s been common for people in our community to mention exploratory testing, only to have someone reply, “Oh, so that’s like unstructured testing, right?” That’s a little like someone refer to a cadenza … Read more

Questioning Test Cases, Part 2: Testers Learn, But Test Cases Don’t Teach

In the last post, my LinkedIn correspondent provided a couple of reasons why she liked writing test cases, and why she thought it necessary to write them down in the early stages of the project. Then she gave a third reason: When I’m on a project and I am the only one who knows how to test something, then I can’t move on to something new. I’d still be testing … Read more

Questioning Test Cases, Part 1

Over the years, LinkedIn seems to have replaced comp.software.testing as the prime repository for wooly thinking and poorly conceived questions about testing. Recently I was involved in a conversation with someone who, at least, seemed to be more articulate than most of the people on LinkedIn. Alas, I’ve since lost the thread, and after some searching I’ve been unable to find it. No matter: the points of the discussion are, … Read more

More of What Testers Find, Part II

As a followup to “More of What Testers Find“, here are some more ideas inspired by James Bach’s blog post, What Testers Find. Today we’ll talk about risk. James noted that… Testers also find risks. We notice situations that seem likely to produce bugs. We notice behaviors of the product that look likely to go wrong in important ways, even if we haven’t yet seen that happen. Example: A web … Read more

More of What Testers Find

Damn that James Bach, for publishing his ideas before I had a chance to publish his ideas! Now I’ll have to do even more work! A couple of weeks back, James introduced a few ideas to me about things that testers find in addition to bugs.  He enumerated issues, artifacts, and curios.  The other day I was delighted to find an elaboration of these ideas (to which he added risks … Read more

You Won’t See It Until You Believe It

Not too long ago, I updated my copy of Quicken. I hesitate to say upgrade. I’ve been using Quicken for years, despite the fact that the user interface has never been wonderful and has consistently declined a little in each version. One of these days, I’ll do a 90-minute session and record some observations about the product. But for now, here’s one. The default sort order for transactions in an … Read more

Why Do Some Testers Find The Critical Problems?

Today, someone on Twitter pointed to an interesting blog post by Alan Page of Microsoft. He says: “How do testers determine if a bug is a bug anyone would care about vs. a bug that directly impacts quality (or the customers perception of quality)? (or something in between?) Of course, testers should report anything that may annoy a user, but learning to differentiate between an ‘it could be better’ bug … Read more

One Test Per Requirement

Despite all of the dragons that Agile approaches have attacked successfully, a few still live. As crazy as it is, the idea of one test check per requirement has managed to survive in some quarters. Let’s put aside the fact that neither tests nor requirements are valid units of measurement, and focus on this: If you believe that there should be one test per requirement, then you have to assume … Read more

You’ve Got Issues

What’s our job as testers? Reporting bugs, right? When I first started reading about Session-Based Test Management, I was intrigued by the session sheet. At the top, there’s a bunch of metadata about the session—the charter, the coverage areas, who did the testing, when they started, how long it took, and how much time was spent on testing versus interruptions to testing. Then there’s the meat of the session sheet, … Read more